Rebekah Champa
Sr. UX/Product Designer based in the Austin, TX area
OneCurator
CLIENT: ZULILY • COMPLETED: LATE 2021
Scope
Lg. (12 mo.)
My Role
Lead Designer
Platform
Desktop only - no plans for mobile
Tools
Sketch, Zeplin, Abstract
Project Summary
This product was built for an E-commerce environment where our internal merchants would select products and create cohesive collections of products for the website. Products range from clothing, home goods, beauty and wellness, jewelry, baby, and many other categories.
Merchants have the important job to curate collections that will produce good sales numbers and margins, as well as being appealing to the customer. They must select products that will meet their demand targets while staying fresh and trendy on the site. They needed a tool that would allow them to accomplish key tasks such as finding and selecting products following a certain theme, a certain price point range, or other types of collections such as seasonal or holiday collections.
Objective
To create a platform for merchants to allow them to find and select products for their collections that would perform well for the business and resonate with the customer.
One Curator needed to be created because merchants were using more than 6 other programs to complete the task of creating a collection. This caused their process to be incredibly difficult to learn for new hires and difficult for even tenured merchants. One Curator was build to merge all of the functions of all the other programs while streamlining the process, making it simpler and faster to get the job done.
Success Metrics
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Time to curate an event including product selection, price and margin calculations, & other data.
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Deprecation of at least 6 previously used tools
Results
Our preliminary results across all pilot users indicated that with the release of One Curator and subsequent deprecation of previous tools their time to curate an event was reduced by 55% from nearly 4 hours to an average of less than 2!
Research
Field Studies and Adaptive User Interviews
I conducted one-on-one field studies which consisted of shadowing multiple users from different teams on their daily process for selecting, curating, and auditing products. During this process, I observed and took extensive notes on each user's pain points. I identified similarities in the pain points users faced in completing their tasks. I asked minimal questions and mainly watched their current process of the tasks I wanted to see. I was careful to avoid leading questions, giving the users scenarios and asking them to complete specific tasks.
Example Scenarios:
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Walk me through your process for curating an event.
Tasks
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Search for good products for the event
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Add products to the event
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Remove products from the event
Scenario
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Walk me through your process for analyzing the quality of your event. How do you make your event “ready”?
Tasks
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Determine a product to keep and why
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Determine a product to remove and why
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Make changes to a product (price, margin, etc)
Some examples of key questions that were asked to the users to determine important information and fill any gaps in my understanding of the user's processes included:
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What are the most time-consuming and frustrating parts of your process?
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What are the most important things you look for in your current process?
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Tell me about how you typically use the sorts and filters.
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When and how often do you have to go through your current auditing process?
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What are you looking for/what targets are you trying to achieve in your current process?
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Tell me about the way you create events and curate products into it.
Identifying Pain Points
I found that through adaptive interviewing and observing the users that many of them had some common pain points. The biggest complaint for the curation process was that they had to use multiple programs and constantly write down or remember product information while switching from one product to the next. It was impractical and caused many errors throughout the process. They would have to go to one place to see past product performance, another place to see similar products for cohesiveness, and yet another place to select new products to keep their collections fresh. They would do all this work and still sometimes have to remove products or go back and find others when they saw them all together if they didn't make sense as a collection.
Journey Map Creation
Based on the information I gathered from all of the user interviews and field studies, I created a user journey map that demonstrates all of the complex steps users have to go through to complete the desired tasks. In addition to listing the steps, this journey map included listing the pain points and a lot of actual user quotes that I could use later to back up my design decisions.
Ideation
Whiteboard Sessions
Many of the features built in OneCurator were intended to eventually deprecate all of the other systems merchants were using to curate products into an event. Many of our ideation sessions were geared toward determining what was working with the current systems, and what was not. What did users like and what did they not like about their current systems?
Concepts and Sketches
From whiteboard sessions and team discussions came many ideas and concepts that were tested with a small group of users to determine the best course of action. For each feature, I would design a sketch or wireframe, present it to the user pilot group, and get their thoughts on which option they thought was best.
Here are some examples of the various sketches that helped us determine the best options for the user and the business:
Wireframes
Initial Wireframes
The initial wireframes were tested with users to get an idea if we were on the right track. We laid out a landing page, which was also the search page, where the user could select filters before seeing the available products to add to their event. From here we made iterations that led to highly effective designs for the user to navigate the site.
Landing Page & Detail View Designs
Landing Page
We needed our landing (search) page to be easy to navigate while supporting a large amount of filters frequently used by the merchants. We put the most common filters at the top and common exclusions preselected for the user's convenience. Filter chips were a nice touch, so users could see what filter's they've already added and easily remove one or more if needed.
I decided to group all of the filters and created a navigation menu reflecting this. This helped users find exactly what they were looking for without having to scan a large page with complex filters. I also created icons for some of the fields to make this process more enjoyable for them.
Detail View
The new designs organized products and product information in a way that was easily scannable yet still detailed enough to help the user make a decision on the product. Before, the detail view was extremely cluttered and overwhelming. I took into consideration all design elements like softening the colors and rounding button and tile edges to help reduce the visual clutter.
I created multiple states for the cards as they were hovered on, selected, static (enabled) or disabled. I also added the ability for cards to have various types of flags, whether it be event related (purple), a publish blocker that needed attention (red), a warning on the product (orange), or key product information (blue). Users found this flagging system much more helpful than their previous system. They could easily see important information on every product as they scanned them.
I used a similar concept for the filter panel as on the landing page, keeping the groupings and navigation to make it much easier for the user to find and select the filters the would need.
One feature some user groups needed was the ability to see sizing and inventory quantities by size. Because this can be a lot of information, I decided the best way to present this information was in the form of a hover. Users loved this because it was easily accessible while keeping the card design clean and concise.
One of the features we added a little later in the game was the "Event Impact" banner. The banner would appear when the user selected one or more products. It would show them what those products would do to the performance of their event before they had to make the decision to add them to their event or not. Users found this feature incredibly helpful in making important decisions adding or avoiding certain products based on how it would impact their personal numbers and event goals.
